Hymn of the Week: July 4
by the Rev. Brooke Myers
6 Pentecost, Proper 9
Songs of Nations
Independence Day falls on a Sunday this year. This patriotic observance has its own set of scripture readings, however a Sunday’s readings supersede any other holiday’s save All Saints’ Day (Nov. 1), Christmas and Epiphany (Jan 6); so don’t expect to hear readings this Sunday relevant to July 4. With the celebration of our nation’s founding looming large in our national consciousness, let’s take a look at a few hymns relating to that epochal event.
The last five hymns in our Hymnal, 716–720, appear under the heading National Songs. We might expect them to be about our nation and produced on native soil, but such is not the case.
Surprisingly, Hymn 716, God Bless our native land, is not rooted in U.S. history, and the 18th c. tune is not American, but English. The tune is oddly named America, and has been called this in Episcopal hymnals for 150 years.The text is not American either, but rather a 19th c. German patriotic work by Siegfried August Mahlmann; but it was freely translated by two Americans: Charles Timothy Brooks and John Sullivan Dwight.
Hymn 717, My country ‘tis of thee, is well known, and was once a candidate to be our national anthem. It has the same English tune, America, as Hymn 716, and the text was inspired by the same German patriotic poem. Its author was Samuel Francis Smith of Massachusetts, a Baptist minister, who claimed to have written it in half an hour.
Hymn 718, God of our fathers, is thoroughly American. Its tune was originally composed for the centennial of the Declaration of Independence in 1876, and was used again for the centennial of the United States Constitution 16 years later. The text by Daniel Crane Roberts, a Vermont Episcopal priest, had been originally sung, strangely, to a tune called Russian Hymn.
Another onetime candidate for our National Anthem, Hymn 719, O beautiful for spacious skies, is among the loveliest in our hymnal. The tune, Materna, was written by the organist at Grace Episcopal Church in Newark, New Jersey, in the mid-1880s, but was originally used with different words. Katherine Bates’ text came to her quickly while taking in the view atop Pike’s Peak in Colorado. This hymn first gained popularity during the First World War.
Our hymnal ends with Hymn 720, our national anthem, O say can you see, Francis Scott Key’s first-hand poetic evocation of the bombardment of Ft. McHenry, Maryland, during the War of 1812. The U.S. flag was then known as the Star Spangled Banner, hence the song’s name. Although the music was long-thought an English folk tune, more recent scholarship has identified it as the work of a late 18th c. American named John Stafford Smith. The U.S. Congress made it the national anthem in 1931.
A hymn not included in National Songs but deserves mention here is Hymn 599, Lift Every Voice and Sing. Widely known as the African American National Anthem, this hymn was originally written to be sung by a Black children’s choir in Florida in 1905 to celebrate Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. Its composer and author, J. Rosamond and James Weldon Johnson, were brothers. The name of this song was used as the title for a 1993 Episcopal hymnal featuring African American hymns and spirituals.
Renditions and lyrics of all these pieces are easily found online, including these:
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